Trying too hard. I wonder if I hadn't read this right after Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell if I would have liked it better. They were both trying to pay homage to the gothic/Romantic era writers, except that Strange and Norrell was brilliant, and this one was.. eh. I appreciated what the author was trying to do, but he didn't do it well enough to keep me reading. Yes, Romantic lit is full of cliche, but the thing is to do it in an intriguing way and with enough wit to keep your audience interested. This book did not have that balance. It had the formula, it just didn't execute things well enough, in my opinion.
To be fair, that could be because this book was originally in Spanish. It could have lost a lot in translation. I know it lost something, actually, because some of the sentences are rather awkwardly phrased. But Arturo Perez-Reverte's gothic-esque novels were also in Spanish, and they still had their magic in translation. So, I don't forgive this guy enough to finish the book. Which I didn't, by the way. Got about halfway through because I was hoping it would get better, but it was still not grabbing me, so. Onto the next!